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USENET rises again?

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Re: USENET rises again?

#171

Post by naravara »

SoftTalker wrote: post #74
mindcrime wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing you want exists. It's called the Fediverse. For the most part, when people talk about "The Fediverse" they mean ActivityPub based sites. You could argue the point, since NNTP is "federated" as well, and one could certainly conceive of federating between the NNTP space and the ActivityPub space. I'm a Fediverse user, fan, and advocate (mindcrime@fosstodon.org), but I specifically mentioned Usenet, because th…

It's been a while but I don't recall a ton of politics on the usenet groups I used to participate in (mostly tech subjects). Of course there were groups for politics, and sometimes a thread would go off on a tangent, but the nice thing about usenet is it was easy to killfile people or threads that you didn't want to read anymore. When I used it it seemed like it was mostly real names (.edu accounts) at least on the g…

The user was talking about internal group politics/drama. Not national electoral politics.

Re: USENET rises again?

#172

Post by SkyMarshal »

troymc wrote: post #7
StevePerkins wrote: post #2

Am I missing the "rises again like a Phoenix" part? This article is just a brief description of what Usenet is, for people under 45 years of age. There's nothing in here about Usenet usage being on the rise, or anything like that. This article talks about Google Groups in the present tense, even though its Usenet hosting permanently ceased around 8 years ago.

The Big-8 Board was re-established, or if you like, it rose from the ashes like a Phoenix. (The Phoenix story is about one bird coming back to life; there's nothing about an increase in the size of some group.)

Where is that hosted?

Re: USENET rises again?

#173

Post by jtode »

chrisco255 wrote: post #167
BearhatBeer wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usenet faded because ISPs all conspired to drop it, en masse, in the early 2000's. Used to be every ISP from Comcast down to the mom and pops had Usenet. Now it's not just uncommon, it's nearly impossible to find any ISP that has their own Usenet feed. And yes the excuse given to drop it was piracy.

Usenet faded because the UX was terrible. It was common in the early 90s because it predates the world wide web, and most people back then were highly technical and could deal with the warts. Everything moved to the web, and Usenet clients were hit or miss. Neither Windows nor Mac came packaged with a client for it, so it certainly wasn't easily discoverable for people who joined the internet later. They probably nev…

I've never had an experience as smooth and easy as usenet on Free Agent as the gui client. Everything else, forums, socials, etc, contain a subset of the features in that setup.

Re: USENET rises again?

#174

Post by dmacvicar »

SoftTalker wrote: post #74
mindcrime wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing you want exists. It's called the Fediverse. For the most part, when people talk about "The Fediverse" they mean ActivityPub based sites. You could argue the point, since NNTP is "federated" as well, and one could certainly conceive of federating between the NNTP space and the ActivityPub space. I'm a Fediverse user, fan, and advocate (mindcrime@fosstodon.org), but I specifically mentioned Usenet, because th…

It's been a while but I don't recall a ton of politics on the usenet groups I used to participate in (mostly tech subjects). Of course there were groups for politics, and sometimes a thread would go off on a tangent, but the nice thing about usenet is it was easy to killfile people or threads that you didn't want to read anymore. When I used it it seemed like it was mostly real names (.edu accounts) at least on the g…

Usenet was sorted by topic. Same people stick to the required topic in different forums.In the fediverse, you follow people, and therefore can't control very well what people post about. I follow some people because I am interested in technical topics, but I end muting some of those because some are very political, and I am not interested in some of these topics.

I don't think the Usenet model can be replicated on top of Fediverse. Not everyone sees instances as a topic thing (I host my own instance).

Re: USENET rises again?

#175

Post by bouvin »

chrisco255 wrote: post #167
BearhatBeer wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usenet faded because ISPs all conspired to drop it, en masse, in the early 2000's. Used to be every ISP from Comcast down to the mom and pops had Usenet. Now it's not just uncommon, it's nearly impossible to find any ISP that has their own Usenet feed. And yes the excuse given to drop it was piracy.

Usenet faded because the UX was terrible. It was common in the early 90s because it predates the world wide web, and most people back then were highly technical and could deal with the warts. Everything moved to the web, and Usenet clients were hit or miss. Neither Windows nor Mac came packaged with a client for it, so it certainly wasn't easily discoverable for people who joined the internet later. They probably nev…

Gnus was a joy to use. Never has an application fitted me better.

Spam was the issue – there were extensions and initiatives to combat it, but it was a losing battle. It was a major cultural loss – Reddit can at its best approach it, but not replace what existed in the early nineties.

Re: USENET rises again?

#176

Post by SoftTalker »

dmacvicar wrote: post #174
SoftTalker wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a while but I don't recall a ton of politics on the usenet groups I used to participate in (mostly tech subjects). Of course there were groups for politics, and sometimes a thread would go off on a tangent, but the nice thing about usenet is it was easy to killfile people or threads that you didn't want to read anymore. When I used it it seemed like it was mostly real names (.edu accounts) at least on the g…

Usenet was sorted by topic. Same people stick to the required topic in different forums.In the fediverse, you follow people, and therefore can't control very well what people post about. I follow some people because I am interested in technical topics, but I end muting some of those because some are very political, and I am not interested in some of these topics. I don't think the Usenet model can be replicated on to…

Hm. Wonder if any newsreaders could "follow" a person, regardless of the group he posted in. I don't recall that feature existing in rn or trn.

Re: USENET rises again?

#177

Post by BearhatBeer »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #154
jghn wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just my opinion but I can't think of a single way in which I found web forums of the early 2000s to be superior to usenet.

Discoverability? A novice could type something into Web Crawler and get a forum back as a search result. Then they could click the link and begin reading and participating immediately. Was Usenet ever that easy?

Even easier, no web search needed. All you needed to do was search the group list for relevant terms. All the Usenet clients supported searching the group list. Then you just tick the checkbox and the articles were downloaded.

Much much easier than using a search engine, scrolling through the results which were half ads even in those days, and trying out the 12 different forums you finally found which were even active...

Re: USENET rises again?

#178

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

BearhatBeer wrote: post #177
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discoverability? A novice could type something into Web Crawler and get a forum back as a search result. Then they could click the link and begin reading and participating immediately. Was Usenet ever that easy?

Even easier, no web search needed. All you needed to do was search the group list for relevant terms. All the Usenet clients supported searching the group list. Then you just tick the checkbox and the articles were downloaded. Much much easier than using a search engine, scrolling through the results which were half ads even in those days, and trying out the 12 different forums you finally found which were even activ…

> All you needed to do was search the group list for relevant terms. All the Usenet clients supported searching the group list

- Group list

- Usenet client

Most people had no clue what that stuff was.

Re: USENET rises again?

#179

Post by dredmorbius »

PreInternet01 wrote: post #115
queuebert wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reddit is, I think, a better version of Usenet culture than the original. Reddit is slow, censored, and for-profit. How could that possibly be better than what we used to have? You still get spam, bots, and flame wars, but you also have a needless popularity contest with votes and mods.

Usenet was definitely slow (very, very slow, even), in the sense that posts made in the US might take up to 18 hours (or whenever dial-up got "cheap") to show up in the rest of the world, or vice versa. Even posts between locally-adjacent sites might take a few hours to propagate. This may, incidentally, help to explain why discourse on Usenet was generally considered to be superior to that, say, on Twitter. But YMMV…

When Australia joined Usenet in 1983, connections were via airmailed data tapes, updated weekly:

http://article.olduse.net/467@sdchema.UUCP>

This would mean that part of the bang path for Bob Kummerfeld's email address was in fact a 747: "!sdchema!sydney!bob"

Re: USENET rises again?

#180

Post by edgyquant »

jghn wrote: post #148
listenallyall wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe the main reason usenet faded I believe it was due to AOL and CompuServe forums, which were most importantly, new, novel, friendly and easy. Technical people were "above" AOL and so those Usenet communities survived a few more years, but ultimately succumbed to web forums which were superior to Usenet in almost every way. Unfortunately, web forums were mostly hollowed out due to social media, and now that…

Just my opinion but I can't think of a single way in which I found web forums of the early 2000s to be superior to usenet.

Don’t know about superior but they were definitely an evolution of the concept and were more decentralized p
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